Scrum - An Overview

In opposite what most people think, Scrum is not a process. It’s a framework for Agile Project Management.

Scrum splits the organization into small, self-organized and cross-functional teams, and the work into small and concrete list of deliverables organized by priority and estimated effort for each task. This framework organizes the time of the project, by sorting the work into iterations. For each iteration, the goal is to deliver a functional code to the customer, get his feedback and then update the release plan and its priorities, and consequently, make the process optimized.

There are two figures that support Agile Development Teams – The Scrum Master and the Product Owner. The Scrum Master is seemed like a coach who helps the team to reach the highest level by using the framework. The Product Owner acts like the customers/users, in order to help the team to develop the right product.

An Agile project starts with a list of features to be developed over the iterations, which are organized on the Product Backlog. Each iteration on Scrum is called Sprint, and it doesn’t have more than a month long to deliver the features (shippable features - coded and tested). Each Sprint starts with a Sprint Planning Meeting in which the Product Owner prioritizes some features of the Product Backlog for another “to-do” list for that Sprint, called Sprint Backlog.

A DailyScrum Meeting is made day by day over the sprint and requires the attendance of all the team members. And then a Sprint Review is done by the end of each Sprint to show to the customers, stakeholders and other interested people on the project what functionalities were made and also to get some feedback that will be helpful for the next Sprint.

Another Scrum’s artifact is the Burndown Chart, which provides a better overall view of the project’s progress, showing it in the form of story points completed, as well as changes to the number of story points planned for the remainder of the release. It’s a great way to show to the customer when the work is on date or late, and help the team to plan the next Sprints in case the team would not be able to build the planned features within an iteration. These charts should be big and posted in visible areas where everyone can see them. You can see below a sample of a Burndown Chart.

There are some Burndown Charts Templates to help the organization start to use this artifact.

There's another artifact widely used, called Burnup Chart - it's more complete than Burndown chart, because it shows two measures that a Burndown Chart doesn't: how much work has already accomplished on the project and how much work is remaining. Some people say that the first one is easier to understand, and should be better to use it to get start, however, the Burnup Chart is better to track velocity, find trends through the past iterations, as well as predict the completion date of the activities of an iteration. 

Then, although Burnup Chart are more complicated than Burndown Chart, it shows essential information that is kept hide on the last one, and avoid the team to discover late a possible delay.


So, instead of a large group, spending a long time building a big thing, Scrum helps the organization to have a small team spending a short time building a small thing, but integrating regularly to see the whole.